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IBMs Tivoli unit has revamped its product lineup and outlined a new strategy to help lower the cost of managing customers e-business infrastructure.
The goal of Tivolis modified product family, announced Wednesday, is to simplify how customers do business with Tivoli and better leverage IBMs sales, research and development resources.
To that end, Tivoli cut in half the number of different product offerings, simplifying licensing and maintenance. At the same time, the Austin, Texas, company announced enhancements to some 30 different products and added new offerings to the portfolio.
Tivolis new architecture and revamped portfolio reflect a sea change at the company, orchestrated under General Manager Robert LeBlanc, according to Jasmine Noel, research director for applications and systems management at Hurwitz Group Inc., in Framingham, Mass.
“For a long time Tivoli was just lost. They didnt know how to react to the rebellion against frameworks, and didnt know how to deal with the shift in the buyer mindset,” Noel said. “I think it was a mental shift that was a long time in coming at Tivoli. They put people where they could be most effective.”
Tivoli consolidated its backup and recovery product set, called Tivoli Storage Manager, so that customers no longer need to buy a separate license for different database management systems that they own. One license can now cover database systems from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Informix, according to Carl Kessler, vice president of Tivoli products.
“Well move all our products onto the PassPort Advantage model, so customers get discounts for all the software they buy from IBM–including Tivoli,” he added.
Tivoli is also working to help bridge the gap between IT professionals and business executives, making it possible to manage IT infrastructure in a way that best meets business goals. For example, Tivoli added a new Service Level Advisor tool to its Tivoli Business Systems Management offering that allows customers to automatically build a Service Level Agreement graph that shows how well IT is complying with the SLA. The Service Level Advisor, for which IBM is applying for patents, can also predict outages based on performance analysis metrics.
Tivoli also this week rolled out additions to Tivoli monitoring products that begin to introduce automated, self-cure functions to the software. The new Tivoli Monitoring for Web Infrastructure, for example, can increase the size of a buffer tool in response to load changes on a Web server and then automatically send a message to the management console alerting administrators of the change. When the load decreases, it can sense that and automatically reduce the buffer pool size.
Tivoli also added a new tool designed to consolidate performance data from different database systems. The new Tivoli Enterprise Data Warehouse, based on DB2, can archive systems management data from different vendors and different management domains.
Tivoli also enhanced its IBM Directory Server with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol support; addressed its weakness in discovering layer two network switches with the new IBM Tivoli Switch Analyzer; and integrated its NetView network monitoring system with the Tivoli Enterprise Console to improve root cause analysis.